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Gamers Hell have posted a 100MB video of footage from the forthcoming LucasArts / Bioware Star Wars MMO Game 'The Old Republic'.

The first Developer Dispatch: The Making of Tython, with developer interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and breathtaking, never-before-seen concept art. Journey through Tython, the planet where the first Force users assembled and the Jedi Order was established. Discover how writers, artists, designers, and other developers came together to create one of the most essential planets in Star Wars: The Old Republic (5:14).

Click here for more info and the download link. Alternately there's a flash-video version here on the official swtor.com site for the bandwidth conscious.

Gamedaily has decided to do one of those lame video game related lists, this one titled "Ten of Video Games' Most Lovable Lummoxes." And who should make the cut but everyone's favorite Department of Death driver Glottis? Maybe it's not so lame after all!

There's been some rumblings (which indyjones.net has picked up on) that the reason LucasArts remains mum on Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, despite its imminent Spring release window, is that the next issue of Nintendo Power is set to reveal all in an exclusive preview of the recently confirmed to still be alive in the form of low-end ports of a cancelled PS3/360 project announced game.

The cover for the March issue of Nintendo Power would certainly seem to corroborate this suspicion. Ignore the implication that Indy will throw an octopus in this game and get excited!

Tingler's Update: It's also worth noting for UK Indy fans that as Nintendo Power is the official Nintendo magazine, the UK's Official Nintendo Magazine may well get it too (just like the recent Brutal Legend preview in both Official Xbox Mags). Indeed, the current issue of ONM is promising 'a very exciting game exclusively revealed' for their next issue.

Some of you probably know about the whole Warner Music Group thing on YouTube. For those of you who don't, what's happening is that basically WMG are committing financial suicide and are, to make money the way everyone else is in the 21st Century, muting any YouTube videos with their music on it. That includes Black Sabbath.

A great interview with Jared Emerson-Johnson, Telltale composer extraordinaire, has been conducted by the blog Original Sound Version. The article, which discusses the tracks and intersperses tons of comments by Emerson-Johnson, is well worth reading for anyone who was a fan of the music in the season (in other words, everybody), and among the cited inspirations for the compositions is the music from the old LEC classics. Here's what Jared has to say about the underwater cavern theme in 202, for example:

I’d like to add that this track was also meant as a respectful ode to some of the music that Peter McConnell has written for various underwater environments over the years. The parallel was obvious to me in the visuals, so I couldn’t resist peppering the music with some little nods to him.

Read it all and remember, Telltale sells soundtrack albums for both Season 1 and Season 2 at their store, complete with original Purcell covers.

Update by Jason: This trailer would seem to confirm suspicions that the internally developed, Euphoria-enabled 360/PS3 version that has been in some stage of development for five years has been scrapped, and that LEC is now going to simply publish the 3rd party Wii, PS2, and handheld ports that did not suffer the same production problems. Note that, like the ports for The Force Unleashed, the Indy game that will be released is unlikely to be very similar to the original, next-gen versions in areas beyond storyline. If what seems obvious about the LEC version is true, it's unknown what if anything is being developed internally at the studio right now.

Although you probably don't give a damn, you should know that BioWare - makers of the original KOtoR (as we spell it in l337) - are developing the game, so it might be the occasional exception to the LucasArts rule and not suck.

Star Wars Battlefront III, the third game in the best-ever-selling SW game series, was originally down to be developed at TimeSplitters creator Free Radical... before they forced to shut their doors. Then it was rumoured to be at Aliens Vs Predator developer Rebellion, but they're apparently only doing the PS2 version.

While they're petitioning Lucas "Blood From A Stone" Arts to take over on the 360/PS3 version too, now it's being reported that the game is back at original developer Pandemic... who were bought by EA last year.

If this is correct, it would mean some very strong ties going on between EA (who own Star Wars: The Old Republic developer Bioware) and LucasArts (whose boss is ex-EA and seems determined to run his new company into the ground). On the other hand, it's probably not true anyway. LucasArts doing something lucrative and obvious to the rest of the gaming world? The very idea!

If you bought Sam and Max (I'm not sure how many episodes: I own all the Sam and Max games) then check your email: you might have a coupon code that lowers down the price of a Season Pass - that's five episodes - for Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People from $34.99 to $19.99. To be honest with you that's a steal and you'd be (and no joking here) incredibly stupid not to buy it. Like incredibly, utterly irreversibly stupid not to get it now. Because it's great quality, is cheaper than the crap that plays in most movie theatres and most importantly is a load of fun. That's more than you can say about 99% of other games.

So go. This is for a very limited time only - I'm not sure if all coupons end on Wednesday but mine does. Maybe someone can clear-up?

Anyways, thanks Telltale Games. You really are more than we could have ever hoped for.

Update: Because I'm a dofus, I didn't notice when it said it expired on Wednesday...the 21st of January. All of them do. OK, anyways. Strong Bad. Super cool.

IGN has heard from multiple sources (both internally at LucasArts and elsewhere) involved in the long-in-development Indiana Jones title for Xbox 360 and PS3 that the game has been cancelled. Unofficially we've heard that developers are being reallocated to other projects and that the new Indiana Jones project that we last reported on in April 2006 is dead in the water.

If it does turn out to be true, maybe the handheld version that LucasArts has had in the can for a year or so (allegedly) might get a release?

"LucasArts remains absolutely committed to the Indiana Jones franchise. While we are aware that fans have been eagerly awaiting additional information on the upcoming game, they can rest assured that details are forthcoming."

This doesn't exactly say yes or no does it? We're getting an Indiana Jones game, but when and developed by whom is still another matter.

The makers of the promising-looking Fate of Atlantis-style fangame Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth have today released... a different Indy game.

Entitled Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Spheres, the short game can be downloaded from the Barnett College website now. We'll update this news post with info on what this game actually is later today.

UPDATE: It's an adventure all right, albeit only one room - it's a slightly late (but very clever) Christmas joke!

"We won't get to meet Shrowdy's mom until A Vampyre Story 4, though she makes a brief appearance at the end of the credits in A Vampyre Story 3. And we will definitely be meeting Jack the Gimper, the creepy chap in the painting. He plays an important role in AVS2. We'll also meet Carpathia the Wolf-Woman ™, the Mortus Monster, and we will get to change Mona's costumes for the first time. And trust me, seeing the outfit she has to wear will be worth the ticket of admission. Also, in the first half of the game the player will be playing Froderick exclusively while Mona is incapacitated. But I should say no more..."

He also mentions that Autumn Moon's non-AVS game will be announced early 2009, hopefully.

Thanks to a mighty blizzard outside that stopped me from going to a party, I got bored enough to surf the internet and - lo and behold - found an ancient article by Tim Schafer, written back in 2007 (that's centuries in internet time) for OXM. So, yay, Tim Schafer. Everyone thank the blizzard outside and then sacrifice your children in its honour.

(PS: Apparently also OXM will be publishing something about Brutal Legend next month. You can thank the blizzard for that too, and then sacrifice your goat.)

Poor, poor Tasha. Oh but we love her so (seriously her comics are rad once you get the feel for them). So to make Tasha feel love by humans and/or bots, you should probably vote for her game to win the Best of Casual Gameplay award at Jay is Games. The game is called Tasha's Game, and it involves the Double Fine Action Staff, tentacles (yeah!) and cats.

Igor Hardy, the author of the Hal Barwood interview just posted about, wrote in to inform me that GamersGate purports to have Mata Hari available for downloadable purchase on January 31st. The product page for the game suggests a price of $39.99.

What is the extent of your collaboration with Noah Falstein on Mata Hari?

We worked closely together for months on the story and design, and then I wrote the dialogï¿½in English yet, even though the first market is Germany. So everything was then translated back into German by Ziggy Fielder.

How has this experience differed from your previous collaboration with him on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?

They were similar experiences. The main difference, I think, is that Noah was ushering me into the world of professional game development back when we did Fate, and this time weï¿½ve both been working in the business for many years. That means a lot of the ideas that go back and forth do so in a kind of old-friend shorthand.

And no, I don't know when Mata Hari will be released in territories beyond Germany either, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Which you can do while reading the full interview!

So Telltale's latest, Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, has been nominated for a number of awards by Nintendo Power. Woo, Telltale! Strange fact, though: although there is a "Best Story/Writing" award, Strong Bad is for some reason not among the nominees. (Nintendo Power magazine has no writers, maybe?) Oh, who cares? Just vote for the game, if anything just so we make Telltale feel (more) loved.

Of course, there's always a reason for you not to vote for Strong Bad. Like, say, that you hate fun games. Or that you don't like good writing. Or acting, you might not like good acting. It might also be because you are ugly, and that your mummy doesn't love you, and that you never played this fantastic game and you want to unleash your hatred on all that is good in this world.

Surfing across the internet yesterday I came upon un trésor: An interview with le Schafer en français. (For those of you who don't know, this is French and not a monkey typing on a keyboard, although it may seem that way to vulgar animals such as le English.)

So I decided to start translating it using my mad translating skillz but I stopped halway through when I realised how inadequate my English is. Mock my attempt:

"jeuxvideo.com > Tim Schafer, you worked on some of the references of the plays d' adventures (Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day off the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango) before leaving LucasArts to create your own company DoubleFine Productions with which you left Psychonauts. This last n' was not a play d' venture strictly speaking but a title d' action/platforms s' supporting on an excellent scenario and a direction of l' twisted enough humour. Precisely, by looking at your course, it is obvious that l' humour occupies a very important place in each one of your plays. Do you consider l' humour like l' one of the keys to success in a play? Would you be therefore to work on a project known as " sérieux" who wouldn't contain any joke, nor element of comedy?"

You may weep openly for this interview you will never read.

Unless...Well, if anyone here is awesome enough to translate this interview from French to English (that foul, vulgar language), then you will have the thanks of Mojo and the maniacal fans of Tim Schafer. I would do it myself mon ami, but my English is a little faible.

Update: Everyone, I want you to say, "Thank you GuybrushtheDwarf for translating the interview, and doing it so well." Thank you GuybrushtheDwarf, for translating the interview, and doing it so well! Thank you so very, very, very much! All I can say is that if I were a hot girl, I'd be totally attracted to you right now and think you were sexy. That's right.

To everyone else: to read the interview, just continue reading below.

Once again, Mojo did not conduct this interview. It was done by these nice folks and translated by the awesome Guybrushthedwarf. Read on!:

Tim Schafer hasn't made a lot of games in the last decade. In fact, he's only made a single one: Psychonauts, in 2006. His name has however going around since the Vivendi-Activision merger. His forthcoming game Brütal Legend was included in the batch of games that were left on the side of the road by Sierra after the transaction and whose future remained uncertain. Today, Schafer and his team can relax, as Electronic Arts saved Brütal Legend from its fate and the game is now announced for Fall 09 on PS3 and Xbox360. Reassured, Tim Schafer let us in on the game development during a phone call.

jeuxvideo.com > Tim Schafer, you worked on a lot of seminal adventure games (Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle et Grim Fandango) before leaving LucasArts to found your own company DoubleFine Production, with whom you released Psychonauts. This title wasn't an adventure game per-say but more of an action platformer rooted in an excellent scenario and a twisted sense of humour. By the way, looking back at your career, humour obviously plays an important part in your games. Would you say humour is the key to the success of a game? Would you be get involved in a so-called 'serious' game which would contain neither jokes, nor comedic elements?

It is not something I plan ahead of time. I like comedy, and so do the people I work with. We like to have fun when we create our games and inserting things in our titles that make us laugh at work comes naturally. In fact, we try to entertain ourselves first thus most of these things end up in our games. Even if we tried to craft something serious, we'd end up turning it into comedy. Brütal Legend is the perfect example of that. Like Full Throttle, in fact. The characters of these games aren't comedy characters. They remain serious through the whole story. But sometimes this is where the comedy comes from.

jeuxvideo.com > How would you define Double Fine Productions's games?

We focus on innovation and creativity. My main goal and my team's is to create brand new and amazing universes that players have never roamed before. Universes with their own rules and protagonists they can relate to as soon as they start playing.

jeuxvideo.com > You said times and times again that it would be fun to develop sequels to your old games from the 90's but that it would be impossible since you don't own the rights to these [they belong to LucasArts]. So why haven't you built a sequel on Psychonauts instead of a creating a brand new world for Brütal Legend? That would have been much simpler, even more so for an independent game studio like Double Fine.

It's always simpler to do the same thing over and and over again. But that goes against our creative nature, which is constantly pushes us toward producing something new. I think it's fun and enjoyable to offer players something new. As a matter of fact, that's even beneficial for the whole game industry. I'm not against sequels. If a worthy opportunity should arise, I would do a sequel. I'm always having these ideas for sequels, but at the same time, I've always had new ideas that I decided to explore first. Maybe one day we'll manage to produce two games at a time at DoubleFine, then we'll see...

Our greatest challenge is linked to our will to remain a small structure bound by a quasi family spirit yet able to create great games. We wish to create games that stand the comparison with the best titles of the market while limiting our team-size in order to not lose our identity. We thus need to be careful and be smart when we develop our games so that they look like they've been made by a team of a thousand people when we did it with half a hundred.

jeuxvideo.com > Where did the idea for Brütal legend come from?

For years, I've been gathering ideas that ended up in this game. During my career, there always was something else to do first and this was never the right time to “implement” these. However, I knew that one day I would make a game in a extreme fantasy world such as Brütal Legend's. I wondered how this game would be called and I found the title Brütal Legend more than 10 years ago. Since then, I've always wanted to make a game called Brütal legend. I love this title! I've been following the elements that would make this game for a while: heavy metal, hot rods...I've scratched my head about all that for years and then, at the end of Psychonauts' production, it seemed to me that the technology was finally there and that I had the experience to create the title.

jeuxvideo.com > Hoagie from Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and now Brütal Legend; you do have an obsession toward heavy metal...

That's true. Even back in the Day of the Tentacle days, I met a guy who was a roadie for a heavy metal band. He had so many unbelievable stories to tell that I immediately thought he'd make an awesome character with his peculiar vantage point on the rock scene that fascinates so many of us. A roadie gets the opportunity to see the glamour of a rock star but also gets the dirty work done. He's the one carrying the amplifiers or cleaning spilled beers. In fact, it's thanks to him that the magic is happening. I always wanted to make something out of this kind of character. My first attempt was Hoagie from Day of the Tentacle. It's true it was more of a comedy-oriented character that appealed to the player because he was pretending to tear the head of hamsters, but the core idea was already there. Long before Brütal Legend, [the roadie] already was a backstage guy, hidden behind the rock star. The one who gets the job done, who gains nothing from it, but who's the true hero.

jeuxvideo.com > It seems music doesn't only serve the story of Brütal Legend but also the core gameplay. The official site tells us that it would possible to trigger guitar solos to defeat ennemies. Can you tell us more about this?

You'll have to wait a while before this particular point is revealed. All I can say is that music really is part of the core gameplay and that our hero Eddie Riggs always wear an axe and a guitar on his back.

jeuxvideo.com > Jack Black plays Eddie Riggs, the main character of Brütal Legend. Were you thinking of him when you began writing the game?

Yes, working with Jack Black really inspired us on the game a lot. His movie, Tenacious D [& The Pick of Destiny] was very rock 'n roll and really funny. Same goes for School of Rock. Those things inspired us a lot. It never occurred to me that we could actually have him but we were hoping that, at least, he would like our game since we got all these things from him. And then, we ended up meeting him and he turned out to like what we did. So, from first inspiration he went on to be a full-blown collaborator.

jeuxvideo.com > After being dropped consequently by the Vivendi/Activision merger, how did you get the moral and motivation of your team up and continue development?

We only work on games that are dear to our hearts and in which we get totally involved and that we love. I've got a team of very passionate people that really make the project their own. It is their game. During this troubled period, the team never felt the game was done for. On the contrary, they got got even more involved in order to make Brütal Legend as good as possible. This goes to show the deep engagement of our team toward the project. So we kept on working and we got the chance to show the game to EA. The good news is that they liked it just the way it was. They were really receptive to the characters, to the fantasy setting and to all that we showed them, in the end. The fact that our work please to these people and that EA Partners already housed others studio that one can only rave about , gave us the guarantee that we found the perfect partner for this game.

jeuxvideo.com > Will having EA beside you influence the development in any way?

I think it will make the development even better and allow more people to hear about our game. I love Brütal Legend and I'm looking forward to showing the game to a greater number of people thanks to EA.

If you've ever wondered what George Lucas ripped-off when making Star Wars, you should watch these two movies Ron Gilbert once made. They are actually quite fun to watch, and as the first commentator says, the hand-stop animation is beautiful.

I want to thank my new cat, dubbed Popcorn (name picked by a two-year old cousin). In the three days I've had her I've already had one toilet back up, a leaking pipe with a tendency to shower my bed with brown water every time the guys upstairs flush the toilet, and a heater that decided to snuff it when the temperature hit the -20°C. But what's relevant to Mojo is that Popcorn also managed to kill my internet, and because I am the Only Active Mojoer no-one bothered to tell you about the various awesome art shows the Double Fine Action Artists are having!

But freak out not! You can visit these shows if you 1. live in San Francisco/can get to San Francisco in time, and 2. are cool enough (which you are, since you read Mojo).

But let's say you neither live in San Francisco, nor read Mojo. Now that probably makes you a loser, and because you're a loser (or not Christian) you probably had no Christmas presents under your tree this year. (I can see your tears.) But you can fix that! Without turning Christian, if you don't want to! (Really!) All ya gotta do is just click here and totally take the Free Stuff Double Fine is giving away, for free (plus 13% taxes).

And last but not least: Scott C got interviewed by Kwanzoo about art-ing it up, how he met Tim Schafer and how love at first sight led to his gig at Double Fine. Also: some of the art-influences for the game. Also: you should read it before I put in more spoilers for the interview. Also, read this: "The game is going to rule, so you should probably get excited." Scott C says so. And he's awesome enough for me to believe. I believe!

The "bi-sodic" release of the PC version of Insecticide has decidedly gone less than smoothly. While the DS version was released this past March, Crackpot and Gamecock elected to release the far superior PC version in two parts via digital distribution, the first of which was made available this past summer, the second of which...we're still waiting on. Whether or not this is the result of development problems or if it's simply something on the publisher's end (Gamecock was recently bought out), it's sort of a sucky situation for people who've been anticipating this story game on a platform where the voice acting is preserved and the detail and draw distance of the environments actually do Ahern's art style justice.

Over on the forums today though, Ascovel noticed an Amazon.co.uk page for a boxed PC version of Insecticide slated for February 28th, and a quick search on the US Amazon site reveals a similar product page, this one with a purported release date of tomorrow. (Sure.)

While one shouldn't get too excited until we get confirmation or somebody's order has shipped (about six months ago a similar PC release appeared and disappeared from Amazon), it's certainly possible that a PC retail release of the whole game is coming, as it was said to have always been the plan after the online release. I have no idea what's going on with Part 2 on the digital distribution end, but it sure would be nice for this game to finally be out. We'll keep you posted.